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Jason Starr. Twisted City

David Miller is in a funk. He recently slumped down the journalistic food chain from the Wall Street Journal to a finance rag called Manhattan Business. The reason for Miller’s fall: his unhealthy obsession with his sister only increased after she died of cancer. In addition, the young reporter lost his friends after rejecting their prescient assessment of his girlfriend as “psychotic”-and she’s repaid his loyalty by partying the nights away with another man. So when Miller’s lost wallet leads to a shakedown by a junkie hooker, he figures it’s just another bad episode in the bleak sitcom of his life. But then the hooker’s jealous boyfriend dies, potentially putting Miller on the hook for a murder rap. Flames licking at his heels, Miller grimly soldiers through a squalid story that takes on his flattened affect as it navigates the usual sordid twists and dares readers to give a damn. It’s the literary equivalent of a Big Mac or Snickers bar: satisfying to devour but immediately forgotten-save for a familiar pang of guilt about straying from healthier fare.